Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (52 page)

A little before midday on Sunday 17 December, in front of a press of courtiers in Richmond’s presence chamber, Princess Mary was betrothed to Charles of Castile through his proxy, the lord of Bergen.
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The fourteen-year-old Mary clasped Bergen’s hand, her grey eyes fixed on those of the ambassador, and recited the long matrimonial speech from memory, ‘perfectly and distinctly in the French tongue’, without any hesitation, pause or ‘bashing of countenance’. Then, after marriage contracts had been signed and exchanged, Bergen kissed her ‘reverently’, placing a gold ring on her wedding finger. The ensuing entertainments, the feasting, dancing and jousting, all went off spectacularly, including Wentworth’s entertainments – though he had a narrow escape, a horseman having to ride ‘in haste’ back to London to fetch a costume that somebody had forgotten to pack. Richard Pynson, now the king’s printer, had published a souvenir account of the occasion. The actors and dancers, it noted, performed in clothes and on stages ‘made and appareilled in the best and richest manner’.

The pioneer of a new Tudor–Habsburg alliance, one made in the best Habsburg traditions – making weddings not war, as its motto proclaimed:
Tu, felix Austria, nube
– Mary was to be queen of an empire that spanned Christendom, stretching from the southern tip of Spain to the borders of Poland and Hungary, from Naples to the Netherlands. As Pynson’s account put it, she would carry the Tudors into a new age of dynastic glory: ‘Thy flourishing red roses be so planted and spread in the highest imperial gardens and houses of power and honour’, that by such ‘buds and branches as by God’s grace shall proceed to them, all Christian regions shall hereafter by united and allied unto thee, which honour till now thou could never attain.’
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Throughout the fortnight-long entertainments, Prince Henry and his on-off bride-to-be were the wallflowers, their long-mooted marriage no nearer to a resolution. Mary had bypassed them both, and their participation must have been tinged with envy. For Catherine, her friend’s wedding was another nail in the coffin of her own prospects. Fuensalida had in his inimitable way ordered her not to attend the festivities at all, given that Ferdinand had withheld his consent to the match; she ignored him. The prince, meanwhile, knew that his younger sister was the focus of spectacular ceremonies that, thanks to his father’s diplomatic machinations, he had never enjoyed.

Away in the city of Cambrai, representatives of Maximilian – emperor, as he could now style himself – and Louis XII of France met under papal mediation, to resolve their longstanding quarrel over the province of Guelders. An independent bishopric embedded in Habsburg territory, and close to France’s north-eastern border, Cambrai was a constant focus for diplomatic intrigue.
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Now, Henry’s ambassador Sir Edward Wingfield travelled there with secret instructions to forward another proposed marriage alliance: this time for the prince’s marriage to Louis’s daughter, Margaret of Angoulême. Through such a match, Henry hoped, he could tear Louis away from his alliance with Aragon, and leave Ferdinand exposed and isolated. Catherine would be left high and dry as well.

But when Wingfield arrived in Cambrai, he learned the real purpose of the summit. Involving not only Maximilian, Louis and the pope, but Ferdinand too, it was to conclude the Holy League against Venice, whose land territories were to be partitioned among the treaty’s signatories. Julius had succeeded in his grand coalition – and Ferdinand, joining it, had outflanked Henry’s attempts to sideline him. Undeterred, Henry kept playing the game, confident in the hand he held. Not only did he refuse to join the league of Cambrai, he tried to break it up. Sending warning to Venice, telling the Signoria what the summit had in fact been all about, he offered to broker a separate pact between the republic and Maximilian. He continued, too, to make Maximilian loans: £10,000, on the security of a ‘jewel called the rich fleur-de-lys’. After all, Maximilian was now part of the family.
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Back in London from his period of self-imposed study leave in the Netherlands, Thomas More flicked through a copy of an account, in Latin, of Mary’s betrothal – an expanded companion edition that Pynson had published for the international market, authored by Pietro Carmeliano. More shook his head in disbelief. Trying to compare Henry VII and the mythical hero Aeneas, Carmeliano had echoed a line from Virgil’s
Aeneid
. In doing so, he had unwittingly put Henry at the bottom of the pile. As More pointed out,
princeps cui nemo secundus
didn’t mean, as Carmeliano thought, a king beyond compare. Rather, it meant the converse: a king ‘to whom no one is second’.
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Luckily for Henry’s Latin secretary, there were few at court qualified to spot his sloppy scholarship; fewer still cared as much as More and his friends. Carmeliano, after all, had rather more important business on Henry’s behalf. At the Spanish court at Valladolid, moreover, his poem had its desired effect. Henry’s ambassador there, John Stile, wrote to Henry how he had presented a copy to Ferdinand, then stepped back and watched the reaction: ‘your grace may be right well ensured that it is much more displeasure to the king [Ferdinand] and all his affinity than comfort for to hear of the said noble marriage.’

Away to the east, bonfires were lit throughout London, flames licking the night sky hungrily, ‘with other demonstrations and signs of joy and gladness’. But behind the junketing, the mood in the city was grim. In the Tower and gaols across the city, Sunnyff and his fellow-prisoners marked time. At the Old Barge, Thomas More and his friends waited expectantly; so too, around the prince, did Mountjoy and Compton. At court, the likes of Buckingham, Northumberland and Kent brooded. And those at the centre of power, who had risen with the regime and profited from it, wondered how they were going to secure the dynasty, to preserve the king’s legacy, and themselves.
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The imperial ambassadors left in the depths of January. With them, the energy of the past months dissipated, and a miasma of ill-health seemed to settle over Richmond. Ordering plentiful supplies of medicine, devotional literature and alcohol, Lady Margaret had retreated to her chamber, surrounded by attentive apothecaries, members of the king’s privy chamber, and her dutiful grandchildren. When in the middle of the month she departed with her household, so too did Henry, retreating to the seclusion of nearby Hanworth. There he settled back into his routine of paperwork and looked over the improvements: newly laid ornamental gardens, together with espaliered apple trees and an aviary; and, in the surrounding parkland, a hunting lodge. But then, in the winter damp and cold, he fell ill again.
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The symptoms were all too familiar: tuberculosis, combined with the suffocating quinsy. He fought on but, as he had done before, he sensed death approaching.

Henry’s preparations for death, modified and developed over the ten years since his illnesses had started, had always been meticulous and to the letter. In his devotion to the sacraments, to the Virgin Mary and the saints, in his good works and religious foundations – the chapel at Westminster Abbey, sightseers already admiring its soaring fan vaulting; the Savoy hospital, on which work had just commenced – the strength of his piety was evident.
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In all this, Henry mirrored the attitudes of the age. People were terrified by the idea of death coming suddenly and unexpectedly. To prepare yourself for death – a battleground for the human soul between God and the devil – was the stuff of life itself: ‘Learn to die’, so one authority stated, ‘and thou shall learn to live.’ It was, too, an art. The countless cheap printed editions of
Ars Moriendi
, or
Craft of Dying
offered guides to the penitence, restitution of wrongs, contrition and unswerving concentration on the hereafter that enabled people to prepare themselves to meet the judgment of Christ, and to give them the best chance of salvation from the horrors of purgatory.
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But for Henry, these preparations had an earthbound significance, too: they were intended for his son’s smooth succession as much as for the eternal well-being of his soul.

In early February Henry paid a visit to the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey, returning a few days later. On his way back to Hanworth, there was a slight but unusual adjustment to his itinerary. Henry rarely travelled on a Sunday. This time, however, he did, journeying south and east to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’, the home of Richard Fox. What the king was doing there can never be known for sure, but it seems likely that he and Fox, the man who had been close to him for over twenty-five years, mulled over the possible outcomes and dangers that would face the dynasty on his death.
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There remained the possibility of a challenge for the throne. The earl of Suffolk was still in the Tower, while his brother Richard continued to float around Europe. Then, too, there was Buckingham, who gave the impression of wanting nothing more than the heads of Henry’s counsellors on the block and the crown on his own. Those resentful at their exclusion from favour or at their ill-treatment, from the earls of Northumberland and Kent to London’s merchants, had no lack of figureheads from which to choose; neither did foreign powers, such as France or Spain, which would sense an opportunity to manipulate things in their favour. On the other hand, Henry’s death would bring about regime change anyway. Prince Henry had given little indication of wanting to continue the system that his father had sustained – he was, it seemed, far more interested in the glory of kingship. Everybody, from his jousting friends, to nobles, churchmen and men of business, looked to him to provide reform: to restore the political order that his father’s reign had twisted out of shape – in their favour, naturally. The king’s regime would, it was clear, die with him; or it would have to give every impression of doing so. The question now, for both Henry VII and those close to him, was how to smooth his son’s path to the throne while preserving the status quo. In order for things to remain the same, it was clear that they would have to change.
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Candlemas came and went. Again, Henry was unable to make the short barge journey to Westminster, but Elizabeth seemed to linger in his thoughts as he ordered money to be given to a ‘woman that lay in childbed’.
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Shortly after that time, people around him started to notice the familiar signs of death.

On the first Sunday in Lent, 25 February, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, preached before the king at Hanworth. Even by the standards of the age, Lady Margaret’s confessor had a morbid fixation: when saying mass, ‘he always accustomed to set upon one end of the altar a dead man’s skull’, and would also place the same skull before him ‘when he dined or supped’ – a habit which undoubtedly caused the table talk to evaporate. Fisher, who had been at hand during the king’s illnesses, knew death when he saw it. By the beginning of Lent, he recollected, the king had ‘clearly recognized that he was going to die’. While there was probably some dramatic license involved in the timing – nothing, after all, could become the king’s preparation for death so much as its coinciding with the season of penitence – he had probably spotted what others saw, too: the mental deterioration that accompanied Henry’s physical decline.

So when at the end of February the royal household moved the few miles downriver to Richmond, it was evident that Henry was going there to die.

Few glimpsed Henry from then on. In the presence chamber, courtiers and servants alike did obeisance to the empty throne under its cloth of estate. The king’s health remained a closely guarded secret and Fuensalida reported how, inaccessible behind the firmly shut door to his privy apartments, he would ‘not allow himself to be seen’.
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As the ambassador acknowledged ruefully, this was hardly surprising on his own account: Henry had blackballed him three months previously, since when he had had no access to the king whatsoever. But it was impossible to conceal from the wider court that all was not well. When ambassadors from Maximilian and Margaret of Savoy arrived on 6 March to consolidate the new treaty, Henry would not even admit them. Instead, they were received and handsomely entertained by the prince. But around the same time the king, hankering after young female company, sent for his daughter Mary and also for Catherine, then at nearby Windsor.

Following the frustrations of Mary’s proxy wedding, Catherine had gained a new boldness. Determined to get to the root of the problems over her dowry, she demanded to inspect the original treaty of her marriage to Arthur. Ill, angry, Henry turned the air blue – or, as Catherine delicately put it in a letter to Ferdinand, ‘permitted himself to be led so far as to say things which are not fit to be written to your highness’. But Catherine, Fuensalida implied in his latest, prurient, dispatch to Spain, was out of control, her assertiveness encouraged by the only man who she would now listen to: her Rasputin-like confessor Friar Diego, who preyed on her extreme devotion and was a bad influence on her, in more ways than one. In fact, Diego’s influence caused Catherine to commit ‘many faults’.

Fuensalida did not list these faults – except, that was, for her spreading malicious gossip about him – but, he said, the blame lay at Diego’s door: he was ‘scandalous in an extreme manner’. Skirting delicately around the subject, Fuensalida finally got to the point. The king and his advisers, he said, could not bear to see the lubricious friar ‘so continually about the palace and amongst the women’. He let the insinuations about Diego and Catherine hang in the air.
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For Catherine, on the other hand, Fuensalida was proving even worse than de Puebla. Apart from treating her like a child, and his utter lack of diplomatic finesse, he had introduced her months before to the Genoese banker who had come with him from Spain: Francesco Grimaldi, cousin to Edmund Dudley’s sidekick John Baptist. At first, Francesco had seemed too good to be true. Not only had he brought with him the letters of credit for Catherine’s dowry, but he was more than happy to accommodate her desperate need for cash.